Everything Begins With An E

Firstly then, in order to define the countercultural domain that concerns this paper, I will start with a very brief outline of what is meant by EDMC. The so-called Second Summer of Love in 1988 was the perfect storm of cultural, political and pharmaceutical effects. A nascent house music sound, defined by a stripped-down, electronic beat, combined with a new drug, MDMA - popularly named ecstasy - and lit a blue touch paper for a generation of young people disenfranchised by the hard-edged politics of Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher famously said there was no such thing as a society. Whilst possibly true within the quotidian world, in the warehouses, fields and nightclubs of the UK, people found their society on the dancefloor.

As the socio-political impact of the rave scene became clear, then EDMC came onto the radar of writers, journalists and filmmakers - all keen, as outlined in my introduction, to use contemporary club preoccupations as source material for their narratives. In her introduction to the 1997 collection of rave fiction, Disco Biscuits, Sarah Champion writes:

It was perhaps inevitable that this culture would finally influence literature too. In the fifties and sixties, jazz and psychedelia inspired writing from Jack Kerouac‘s On The Road to Allen Ginsberg‘s ―Howl‖ and Tom Wolfe‘s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. In the nineties, we have Irvine Welsh‘s Trainspotting, the book, the film and the attitude (Champion, 1997: xiv)

Indeed, Champion goes on to argue that EDMC is actually better served by fiction than by its journalism or, indeed, music. Such EDMC films and literature soon formed secondary phenomena, of interest to both participators and outsiders. Stan Beeler writes about this notion this in his book Dance, Drugs and Escape and, although I will take issue with aspects of his standpoint, I agree with his assertion that such texts serve two different functions:

the first is to describe the subculture to the mainstream and the second is to allow the members of the subculture to celebrate their participation in ways other than clubbing (2007: 25)

To consider, for a moment, the two texts together. The fact that both films are Canadian- financed productions and either in part (Heydon) or entirely (Lux), filmed in Canada, highlights the very strange co-incidence of their concurrent appearance. This is only accentuated when you note the websites for the two films: www.ecstasymovie.com (Heydon) and www.ecstasyfilm.com (Lux). However on reflection, although the timing of their release may be considered coincidental, their title and choice of subject matter actually says a great deal about the on-going penetration of EDMC within mainstream culture.

It might also be assumed there is an agenda – at turns both provocative and promotional - behind the choice of the word ―ecstasy‖ as the title for a film. MDMA was the fuel that powered the rave revolution. First patented as Methylenedioxymethamphetamine in 1912 in Germany, then further synthesised by chemist Alexander Shulgin in America, in its very early years MDMA was given the street name ―Adam‖ and also ―empathy‖, because of its affect on serotonin levels and the resulting openness experienced by users (Collin, 2009: 25). However street level marketers realised they needed something more immediate and powerful and settled on, in the words of Matthew Collin, ―a seductive new brand name - the

word ecstasy‖ (2009: 28) which led to a ―chemical carnival, a form of mass intoxication without precedence‖ (Jay, 2010: 46). Such is the ubiquity of EDMC that the potential audience for these two films – the so-called ―Chemical Generation‖ - would be well aware of the connotations of the word beyond its dictionary definition and that as such, the title is codified shorthand for that audience, a signifier of its countercultural, chemical content. However if we now return to the two films, the use of the word is rendered somewhat problematic. In the case of the Lux text, the red pills that form the focus for the film‘s drug use are pharmaceuticals stolen from a mental hospital and are therefore patently not MDMA. In the case of the Heydon film, the issue is less to do with pharmaceutical verisimilitude and more broadly to do with the marketing of the film itself. The film is based on an Irvine Welsh short story titled, in fact, The Undefeated and subtitled An Acid House Romance. The film therefore appropriates the title of the actual collection rather than the novella itself. As argued above, one might assume that this is for the greater marketing impact of the final product. Both films subscribe to what film critic Mark Cousins, in his work The Story Of Film, refers to as ―Closed Romantic Realism‖. In other words, the fourth wall is very much in place and the drama is contained entirely within the construct of the film, which we observe, I would suggest, as floating voyeurs. Cousins references the word romance as ―emotions in such films tend to be heightened‖ and realism because ―people in such movies are recognisably human and the societies depicted have problems similar to our own‖ (Cousins, 2004: 494). There are, of course, humans within these texts, and love stories at the heart of both films. However, it could be argued that the most intriguing character in both narratives is the drug itself; the most interesting relationship that between the characters and the drug. In Teaser Trailer 31 a voice over recounts the various street names for MDMA: ―eccies, disco biscuits, white doves, the club drug, a love drug, X, MDMA, 100% pure ecstasy‖. Teaser Trailer 22 for the Heydon film features pills falling through the air, in slow motion, like chemical confetti. The marketing poster for the Lux film features a mountain of white pills, on top of which stands a girl in her school uniform:

Fig. 1. Marketing poster for the Lux film, Ecstasy

1 _{Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy Teaser Trailer 3, You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5ls2TegJ60 [Accessed September 27}th

2011]

2 _{Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy Teaser Trailer 2, You Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkqezYFu43w [Accessed September}

Both vehicles seem to be suggesting oversupply and overconsumption, that the underlying driver of the films‘ narrative is excess.